How to Build a Chat Application using React, Redux, Redux-Saga, and Web Sockets

In this tutorial I’m going to build a basic chat room. Every user that connects to the server is registered upon connection, gets a username, and then can write messages that are broadcast to every connected client.

There’s a lot to learn about this topic and the new browser APIs. I publish one new tutorial every day on my blog about frontend development, don’t miss it!

The application is a distributed application built using a Node.js server, and a browser client built in React, managing data using Redux and side effects with Redux-Saga.

Initialize create-react-app

Let’s start up the project by using the create-react-app quickstarter, create-react-app chat

Once this is done, cd in the app folder and run yarn start

The chat app layout

Our app will have this basic layout, which is very common in chat apps:

To do this, we need to create a static version of a chat using plain HTML and CSS, which is a minimal, retro-style chat layout with CSS Grid.

The code is very simple:

The result is a sidebar that will host the list of users and a main area with the new message box at the bottom of the screen:

Add Redux to manage the state

Now let’s talk about the data.

We’ll manage the state using Redux.

Install Redux and react-redux with yarn add redux react-redux . Then we can translate the basic HTML layout we added on top and prepare it to fill the components we’ll create later:

We include the Sidebar, MessagesList,and AddMessage components.

They all have:

a presentational component, which manages the user interface

a container component, which manages its behavior and the data that the presentational component will show

Let’s edit the main app index.js file to initialize Redux, then import the chat reducer, and then create the store .

Instead of telling ReactDOM to render <App /> , enter Provider, which makes the store available to all the components of the app, without explicitly passing it down.

Next, the actions.

Enter the actions constants to the ActionTypes.js file, so we can reference them in other files easily:

This file contains the four actions that will power our chat. You can add a new message, and a new user can be added to the chat. A new message can be sent, and the server will send updates to the users list when a person joins or quits the chat.

When a new message is created, I now force the author name to “Me.” We’ll add usernames later.

The reducers take care of creating a new state when an action is dispatched. In particular:

when a message is added by us, we add it to the (local) list of messages

when we receive a message from the server, we add it to our list of messages

when we add a user (ourselves), we put it in the users list

when we get an updated users list from the server, we refresh

Let’s dive into the components that will render this data and trigger the actions, starting with AddMessage:

This functional component is very simple, and creates an input field into the #new-message section. When the enter key is pressed, we dispatch the addMessage action, passing the value of the input field.

Next up: the Message component. It renders a single chat message, by using the Author: Message format:

It is rendered by the MessagesList component, which iterates over the list of messages:

The Sidebar component instead iterates over each user, and prints the user name for every user that joins the chat:

We generate the Container Components for the above Presentational Components, by using the connect() function provided by react-redux :

This code gives us this nice result. When we type a message and press enter, it’s added to the messages list:

Adding ourselves in the users list

The sidebar should show the list of users. In particular, since now the app does not talk to anyone, we should see Mein the sidebar. Later on, we’ll add additional people that join the chat. We already have the addUser Redux action, so it’s a matter of calling it in our index.js file after initializing the store:

Testing

Let’s add automated tests to make sure everything is working correctly and continues to work correctly in the future when we add more functionality.

Since I’m using create-react-app, Jest is already available to use, and I can simply start adding tests. To keep things simple, I add the test file into the folder that contains the file to be tested.

We start by testing our actions:

and we can test our reducers as well:

We also add some basic tests for our Presentational Components:

Adding a server-side part

A chat that is local and does not communicate to the network is, frankly, not a very interesting place to spend time. Let’s create a centralized server where users will log into, and where they can talk to each other.

As soon as a client connects we start listening for the ADD_USER and ADD_MESSAGE events. When the client establishes the connection, it will send an ADD_USER event with the name. We’ll add it to the server-side list of users and issue a broadcast to all the connected clients.

When an ADD_MESSAGE event is sent, we broadcast it to all connected clients.

On connection close, we remove the user name from the list and broadcast the new users list.

On the client-side, we need to initialize the WebSocket object and send an ADD_USER event when we connect to the chat. Then we listen for ADD_USER and ADD_MESSAGE events broadcast by the server:

We’ll import setupSocket() from the main index.js file.

We now need to introduce a way to handle side effects into our code, and to handle creating a WebSocket event when the user types a message, so it can be broadcast to all the connected clients.

To perform this operation in a clean way, we’re going to make use of redux-saga, a library which provides a good way to handle side effects in Redux/React.

Start with yarn add redux-saga

We initialize the redux-saga middleware and connect it to the Redux store to hook our saga:

Redux-Saga is a Redux middleware, so we need to initialize it during the store creation. Once this is done, we run the middleware and we pass the user name and the dispatch function. Before doing so, we initialize the socket so we can reference it inside the saga.

Previously, the user was called ‘Me,’ but it’s not nice if every user is calling itself ‘Me.’ So I added a dynamic username generator, using Chance.js. Every time we log in, we have a unique name generated for us by importing utils/name :

Let’s now dive into our saga:

Conceptually it’s very simple. We take all actions of type ADD_MESSAGE and when this action occurs, we send a message to the WebSocket, passing the action and some details. The chat message sent by our user can be dispatched to all connected clients by the server.

Here we get to the final result, and below you can see a gif that shows how the chat works with multiple clients connected. We can open as many windows as we want, and as soon as we load the server URL, we are going to be connected with a new username to the chat. We don’t see past messages, like in IRC, but we will see every message written from the moment we sign in.

As soon as we leave, our username is removed and the other folks in the chat can continue chatting.

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